High above the smoldering citadel, the great bell in the tower of St. Jude of the Mountain began to toll. It didn’t sound the slow, measured peal of the daily offices, nor the rapid, syncopated clatter of a festival day. It swung in the wild, wild rhythm of the civic alarm—clang, clang, clang—the hammer striking the bronze rim with desperate, uneven force that rattled the frosted windowpanes of the town below.
The town of High Karst was a tiered settlement of gray limestone apartments and slate-roofed cottages clinging to the steep mountain slope beneath the Citadel walls. Within ten minutes of the first stroke, the narrow, winding alleys were choked with people pouring out into the freezing blizzard. Miners with animal fat lamps hooked to their caps, women wrapped in thick plaid shawls, apprentice stone-cutters in stiff leather aprons, and elderly draymen leaning on hazel walking-sticks crowded into the central market square. They stared up at the billowing black smoke pouring from the castle vents.
At the iron gates of the Citadel raised stone road, twenty hired blades in the black-and-gold livery of Guildmaster Karr had formed a bristling line of boar-spears across the road. Behind them, two mounted officers sat on heavy northern geldings, their wheel-lock carbines resting across their saddle-bows.
